Verbo.se

Cell Phones Don’t Cause Brain Cancer

07/12/2006

TIME.com : You can stop worrying about getting brain cancer from your cell phone. A massive study of just about every private cell phone user in Denmark shows no link between gabbing on your mobile and the development of brain tumors.

The 420,000 participants averaged about 8.5 years of cell phone use, although some of them had been using cell phones for as long as 21 years. But there was not even a hint of an increase in brain cancer incidence the longer they used the phone.

A closer examination of different types of brain cancer from gliomas to acoutsic neuromas showed no increase in brain cancer subtypes either, according to investigators, led by Joachim Schuz of the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology of the Danish Cancer Society in Copenhagen.

CIA role claim in Kennedy killing

05/12/2006

JFK next?

BBC NEWS: New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy’s assassination has been brought to light.

The evidence was shown in a report by Shane O’Sullivan, broadcast on BBC Newsnight.

It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968.

The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles.

Security Of Electronic Voting Is Condemned

02/12/2006

Like, duh.

Washington Post: Paperless electronic voting machines used throughout the Washington region and much of the country “cannot be made secure,” according to draft recommendations issued this week by a federal agency that advises the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

The assessment by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, one of the government’s premier research centers, is the most sweeping condemnation of such voting systems by a federal agency.

In a report hailed by critics of electronic voting, NIST said that voting systems should allow election officials to recount ballots independently from a voting machine’s software. The recommendations endorse “optical-scan” systems in which voters mark paper ballots that are read by a computer and electronic systems that print a paper summary of each ballot, which voters review and elections officials save for recounts.

Can your mobile microphone be “activated”?

02/12/2006

I consider myself pretty clued-in technically, but this never even occurred to me! Presumably this is possible with European phones too?

News.com: The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

Kudos to Cork University Press

01/12/2006

Like that Craftery fella, I’ve been known to bitch and whine about companies when I get bad service, but I have to admit that I rarely take the time to do the opposite.

Today I received service that honestly put a smile on my face though, so I’ll kick off the testimonials with Cork University Press, who gave me a free copy of the Atlas of Cork City today because the first copy I bought from them was nicked; despite the fact that it was absolutely no fault of theirs.

Thank you Mike and everyone in CUP, I really appreciate it!

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(Of course I still get an opportunity to bitch and whine, about the stupid and/or lazy postal worker that left the parcel on top of the mailboxes in the lobby of my building, and about the thieving scumbag that ripped it open and stole the book out of it.)

Wikipedia accuracy ratings

28/11/2006

arstechnica: A new salvo has been fired in the perennial war over Wikipedia’s accuracy. Thomas Chesney, a Lecturer in Information Systems at the Nottingham University Business School, published the results of his own Wikipedia study in the most recent edition of the online journal First Monday, and he came up with a surprising conclusion: experts rate the articles more highly than do non-experts.

Somewhere nice for christmas dindins?

28/11/2006

If anyone has any recommendations of somewhere nice for christmas dindins, please post a comment below, or email me if you’re one of those freakish types that thinks part of their soul will melt if their words are printed on the World Wide Internet. Cork city and county for preference, although I’ll travel a small bit further afield for something extra nice.

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